Making Things Better (11 page)

Well, he had said, in some confusion, I'll leave you time to get settled. If you would like some coffee I'm just above you. Coffee would be great, said Sophie Clay. He had time to notice that her flat contained very little in the way of furniture apart from a large bed and an oversized television. We ought to get acquainted, he had said, as we're living at such close quarters. She had looked up, surprised. I don't suppose I'll be here much, she said, but thanks, I will have that coffee. I'll expect you both then. Not Jamie, she said; Jamie's got to get to work. She had kissed the young man passionately before sending him out of the door. Nice to have met you, said Herz politely to the departing figure, whose heavy tread sounded all the way down to the street. Moments later he heard a car door slam, and then a car drive off. He noticed that more bags had been added to the one he had already taken in, and manhandled these as best he could. Normally after such exertions he would have sat down quietly until his heart returned to its regular rhythm. Instead, with only slightly shaking hands, he went into his kitchen to prepare coffee. On a tray he thoughtfully placed a plate of biscuits, hoping for no more than what he thought of as an agreeable diversion. He could buy his newspaper later in the morning.

When they were seated, with the tray and the untouched biscuits between them, he had time to notice that she was beautiful, in a severe and unadorned way that he immediately found attractive. He told himself that any man would have had the same intense admiration for her pale regular features and scraped-back hair. She looked as if she had just got up, and would go through the day in just such a negligent manner, which was quite different from that of the women he had known, all of whom had seemed anxious to present themselves in a favourable light. Even Josie, in the early days of their marriage, had spent time in front of her mirror, had brushed her unruly hair, applied lipstick. It was this girl's pale lips that he found particularly beguiling, especially when they parted to reveal faultless teeth. She had introduced herself, had handed him a card which read, ‘Sophie Clay. Independent Financial Consultant'. Oh, he had said, how very opportune; you may be able to advise me. She had looked up at him unsmiling, said that she worked in the City, for companies, on a freelance basis; she did not do private work. Oh, how disappointing, he had said, wondering at the note of joviality in his voice; I should have enjoyed consulting you. She had lifted one eyebrow. Since you are so near at hand, he had added, feeling foolish. As for the arrangements here, do feel free to call on me. I am usually at home in the evenings, and of course in the early mornings.

He liked to think of her, in her black trouser suit, moving among the sort of men who worked in financial institutions and who would look up from their desks to appraise her slight neat figure before returning to their calculations. He liked to think of her setting out each morning with her briefcase and returning in the evenings to their common home. He did not quite time his outings to coincide with hers but was pleased when they did. In addition he was glad to be of service, to take care of her spare keys, to sign for a registered letter, to pay Ted Bishop. Her severe demeanour, which was her most attractive feature, broke down somewhat in the late evenings, and, regrettably, at night, when he supposed Jamie to be in residence. This he found much more annoying than the laughter and conversation on the patio, which was now furnished with a table and chairs, and sometimes a radio tuned to a foreign station. He did not really object to the friends she invited back for the evening and whose shouts of laughter were clearly audible. They did not seem to feel the cold; sometimes they were still there after he had gone to bed. This he found quite acceptable, welcoming the sounds of life into what had for so long been sadly lifeless. Rather less acceptable were the disturbances from the bedroom directly below his. Yet in the morning she would appear businesslike, even repressive, as she went off to work with her briefcase and her copy of the
Financial Times.
He could hear her heels, surprisingly loud, on the pavement before they faded away into the distance.

He told himself that his interest in her was paternal, although he was alive to her beauty, as any man would be. He had no children, no grandchildren, and this girl, in her late twenties or early thirties, might have been a grandchild. This reflection aroused others: regret for his past blamelessness, together with a fierce desire for some sort of reward before it was too late. What this could be he had no idea, nor was he foolish enough to fantasize. He felt as if for the first time a longing for love such as he knew should only be felt by the young. He shied away from the evidence of his own physical decline, his tall sparse body, his large red hands, the thick veins that marked his dry sapless arms. The presence of a young creature, so nearly under his roof, kept his thoughts chaste, yet when he went out into the street he was amused to find himself entertaining notions that were almost lubricious. These were not confined to the person of Sophie Clay: he saw women everywhere who offered some almost forgotten possibility of pleasure. This was a welcome reaction; this was when he most felt like a man. He raised a hand in greeting to the woman behind the counter at the dry-cleaners, and was gratified to see her smile and nod, as if responding to an entirely welcome invitation. The same went for the girls in the supermarket, whom he now felt inclined to tease. All this was new and delightful. Only occasionally did he become aware of the absurdity of the situation. It was then that he lambasted himself: an old man trying to be flirtatious was as ridiculous as the cuckold in the cruel dramas he had studied at school and which he remembered with uncomfortable vividness. It was then that melancholy made surreptitious inroads. He welcomed it back as a familiar, while making determined efforts to remain urbane, detached, even diverted by his own condition. He would turn himself into an object of study, and spend not entirely fruitless evenings dissecting his own behaviour. This restored his objectivity, but did not quite remove an awareness of potential damage.

In all this welter of new or unaccustomed feelings it was important to keep Sophie Clay inviolate. He thought that what he felt would be understood by anyone who had lived as long as he had: the regret combined with the avidity, the libidinousness too. The old cherished the unmarked faces of the young, but resented them as well, even wanted to wreak some havoc on them before their own impulses died. That was the reason for so many of the spiteful remarks old people exchanged among themselves, condemning behaviour of which they were now deprived. Those who had been led along the paths of righteousness were the most bitter of judges. He had not been of that number, but bore the marks of an earlier education which he now thought of as picturesque in its quaintness. Respect had been the keynote, showing it, deferring to it at all times. That he had gained any experience at all was a marvel to him, but he observed that life had a way of breaching the most jealously guarded of strongholds, introducing that note of anarchy which some found unbearable, and others, himself included, a blessing, an endowment. From his reading he knew that nature was merciless, would not condemn a mismatch, would even encourage one for its comedic potential, such as enjoyed by the gods of antiquity who held mortals in such derision that they were only mildly diverted by the foolishness they exhibited. Yet it was enlivening to share for a brief moment the standpoint of those same gods, to adopt a callousness that had been absent from his sentimental education, to let all principles recede into an inhabitual limbo, and to obliterate the careful hierarchy of obligations that society is all too willing to impose. It was all wonderfully welcome, a last moment of blitheness before consciousness was finally extinguished.

Yet when he stood at the window to watch for Sophie's return he was not entirely comfortable. Why else would he dodge out of sight when he saw her waiting to cross the road? Why did he find Jamie, her intermittent companion, so objectionable? When he was in bed and aware of the intimate noises he wondered how he could tactfully allude to this. To remind her, with excusable jauntiness, that the house was badly insulated would not quite do. He would have liked to convey complicity, which was even more ridiculous. And she would not modify her behaviour, for he suspected a cruelty in her which in fact she had never manifested. All she had ever shown was indifference, regarding him as a fussy neighbour who was useful in tedious minor ways, and in whom she otherwise took not the slightest interest. He slept badly, waking several times, shamefully alert for signs of life. It was almost a relief when she was away for the weekend.

Even then he would find himself standing at the window, waiting for her return.

11

As his longing grew Herz rose earlier and earlier in the morning. Only in the dark streets, the empty unresonant air, could his inchoate feelings reach a precarious point of equilibrium. As he walked he wondered for how long he could sustain this pitch of tension, in which the past mocked him for his foolishness. He was still sufficiently aware to understand that in allowing himself this brief interlude for aberration he would be able to live out the rest of the day with a semblance of self-mastery. Occasionally he was able to mock himself for the old fool that he undoubtedly was; more usually he regained fragments of the excitement that had originally urged him towards expansion, liberation. He knew, confusedly, that something had been denied him, that he was worth more than the pale simulacrum of the life he had inherited, though that life had been based on the most sensible of precepts. He had not neglected his duty, or duties: he had made the best of what had been on offer. He had never considered himself free enough to choose. That, he saw, was the problem underlying his present dilemma. A life of observing the rules does not predispose one to reckless happiness.

Realistically he knew that he could expect nothing but the pleasant stimulus of watching a young life at close quarters, such as might be enjoyed by any parent, or rather grandparent. Unrealistically he desired pleasure for his own sake, or perhaps for its own sake, some measure of reward for all the careful years. Unsuitable images presented themselves, and were briefly but furtively enjoyed. At such moments he was grateful for the entirely ordinary aspect of the streets, undisturbed at this hour apart from mysterious young men cleaning the windows of sleeping shops. Turning once more towards home he was able to re-inhabit his usual self, and, with the aid of physical fatigue, become once more a nondescript pedestrian, at one with those others now emerging from their private unsupervised lives, and assuming the normality of those bidden to join the crowd. Even now cars were starting up, buses filling with workers; soon the business of the day would be engaged, and he would be back in his ordinary disguise. Routine would help, and he saw that routine must keep him sane. For what had threatened was surely insanity. He had never been given to feelings of such intensity. Yet even now, sober once more, he caught an echo of what had inspired them: the pure unthinking demands of the self.

A persistent admirer of Freud, Herz had a deep respect for the unconscious and its promptings and was even adept at bringing higher considerations into play. These, however, tended now to be fugitive. On approaching the house he simply wondered whether he would be likely to encounter Sophie on the stairs, or whether he was still too early for her. He was sufficiently rational to know that he must not contrive a meeting, must not linger, must not offer greetings, or an explanation for his presence where none was required, must not even stroll along the same stretch of pavement in the evenings when she might be expected to return home. The most he could hope for was something in the nature of the accidental, the unexpected, such as the times, fairly frequent, when she ran out of milk or bread or some other life-saving commodity with which he was always well supplied. Although he held her spare keys he had never committed the indiscretion of entering her flat, nor would he: the very idea was distasteful to him as a fellow property owner. Jamie did not bother him. If anything he considered him an unworthy adversary, no match for his own towering preoccupations. These made him a little more brusque than usual, though sometimes he looked up startled, as if woken from a sleep. When asked a question, however mundane—
The Times
was late today, would he take a
Telegraph
instead?—a second would elapse before he was able to reply. He supposed that in this he conformed to an acceptable stereotype, harmless, absentminded, getting a bit forgetful. At such times a sadness overcame him. He no longer wanted to confide, was indeed grateful that there was no longer any opportunity for doing so. Briefly he thought of Josie, in her mother's little house, keeping her thoughts to herself. It was ironic that at a moment of almost identical regret there was no possibility that they might discuss such matters, might sympathize, might ruefully recognize a pattern in their otherwise distant solitudes, might once more find themselves intimates.

He let himself into the flat, preparing to spend the greater part of the day there until the evening released him for another excursion. That this was predicated on Sophie's return was no longer hidden from him: he took care only to raise his hand in greeting if he saw her, fearing the rush of words that might ensue. This evening walk calmed him and did something to prepare him for the night. It was the morning that found him in disarray, as if he were still young and in thrall to his body, or as if he were still younger and dismayed by that body's evidence. By contrast the days were almost peaceful. He would go through the papers in his desk—old records, letters received or not sent—as if preparing for a journey, an absence. At the back of his mind was the suspicion that he might need to move on if his future in the flat proved to be untenable. There was as yet no indication that he might not be able to afford a new lease; no demands had been made, no documents delivered. In fact nobody seemed to know that he was there. Yet he was sufficiently familiar with dispossession, such as that which had affected his early years, and of makeshift arrangements such as Edgware Road, or, worse, Freddy's hostel in Brighton, to sense uncertainty and to be once more ready to confront it. Yet while pausing to scrutinize a newspaper cutting which for some reason he had thought to file he could not imagine time spent in any more urgent fashion, and was almost bewildered when the darkness of late afternoon reminded him that days like these might be threatened by change. It was then that the prospect of a further late walk, but, more than that, the anonymous company of strangers, returned him to himself, so that by the evening he was sufficiently appeased to have forgotten the disruptions of the early morning, those unreal dawn hours, in which a more primitive and feral twin might break cover and destroy the whole structure of his life.

It was not that he wanted to appropriate Sophie Clay for his own purposes, whether these be interested or disinterested. He wanted the image of a lover, an almost abstract lover, to keep him company. He did not know whether this illusion was permissible, whether it was anything more than a fantasy which should have been confined to youth and the troubled days of adolescence. Yet he had read enough to know that infinite longing was the stuff not merely of romance but of the most rigorous of classical fictions, and that although it was almost certainly a weakness it conferred a sort of heroism. He felt more closely in touch with other men during those disturbing early mornings than when he was peacefully seated at his desk sorting through the inconsequential papers that he could not bring himself to discard. Once again he was tempted to examine the photographs, and in doing so found in them a new pathos which disarmed him. For all its unruliness his early-morning self was preferable, more brutal, but also more honest. His daytime life was already that of a man sinking into senescence. When he awoke he was almost reassured by the lawlessness of his thoughts. This, he knew, was how men's minds had always operated. He did not deceive himself that he was a danger to others, not even to himself, though that was not so certain. He thought that he managed well enough. The only difference was that he no longer felt euphoric. There was no sensation of excitement, such as he might have welcomed, only an increasingly grim acquaintance with the further reaches of his mind.

When the postman called with a parcel for Sophie Clay he took it in automatically, hardly caring that this would give him a pretext for seeing her in the evening, but grateful that this event would give the day some shape. The intervening time could thus be spent peaceably doing nothing very much, trying to subdue anticipation of a meeting. He even admitted to a certain weariness with his changing moods, thought back almost fondly to his afternoons at the National Gallery which were now closed off from these latter days, and bathed in a sort of false harmonious reminiscence, though he had occasionally failed to respond to the familiar images. He knew that such afternoons were irrecoverable, that if he were to retrace his steps, pretend to be the man he had once been, the pictures would have lost their power to move. Unthinkably, they would present a blank surface to his unseeing eye. This would be against the natural order; his reactions would be circumscribed, deadened, or if not deadened, impatient. He would be like Freddy, thankfully laying aside his higher nature in order to accommodate impulses that he considered nearer to home. He was not as brave as Freddy had been in opting for the temporary, the unsuitably restrictive. He still cherished his small comforts, felt disturbed at the thought of having to uproot himself once more. At the same time he knew that his restlessness would enable him to deal with new demands if they should present themselves. The entirely unforeseen benefit of his more or less intolerable situation was an ability to live in the present, to calculate the advantages of turmoil over peace and quiet, and in doing so to be ready, prepared, active, even impatient.

Sophie's package was large and blocklike. He manoeuvred it into his flat, briefly wondering what this was doing to his heart. By mid-morning he was drained, seemingly incapable of future movement. The arrival of Ted Bishop, accompanied by his infant grandson, roused him from what may have been a brief trance.

‘You don't mind Teddy, do you? Only I couldn't find anyone to leave him with.'

‘Delighted,' said Herz, grateful for the presence of a real child after so many phantoms. ‘Would you like to do some drawing, Teddy?' A pause, and then a nod. ‘I'll just make the tea. Not much to do today, Ted,' he said over his shoulder as he went into the kitchen. ‘Just give it a quick tidy-up. Perhaps the windows? Or not, if you're not up to it.'

‘No, you keep it pretty clean, I must say. Not like downstairs. The stuff she's got down there.' He made head-shaking sounds of disapproval.

‘Come, Teddy,' said Herz, picking up the heavy little body and settling it in a chair at his desk. ‘Here's a nice red pencil.' He closed his hand over the small fist and guided it into making a rough circle. ‘Now see if you can do it.' But the wavering movements were too weak; the pencil failed to make contact with the paper. Fortunately the pencil itself was sufficiently distracting; passes were made with it over the paper, until the rage of the artist, or something like it, sent both pencil and paper to the floor. Behind him Ted Bishop exhaled smoke, coughed noisily, stubbed out his cigarette, and finally engaged in more or less efficient activity. Herz removed the ashtray, washed it, and put it away in the kitchen drawer where it belonged. He was burdened by the knowledge that he should be entertaining them both, but could not bring himself to do so. He wanted them out of the flat, could not give them his usual attention, though the child, quite at home, was stamping round the living-room, on his way, as Herz knew, to pulling the books in the bedroom from the shelves and using them as building blocks.

‘Crafty little bugger, isn't he?' said Ted. ‘Well, if you're sure. I'll do a bit more next week. Truth to tell, my back's not too good.' The recital of symptoms, which Herz normally appreciated, was perhaps shorter than usual, and less interesting. He was strangely absentminded, could not concentrate on what was being said; in any event he had heard it all before. He took out his wallet, his usual signal that the morning's work had been concluded to his satisfaction, whether or not this was the case. He gave the child the red pencil, ruffled his hair, and led him firmly to the door.

‘I'll see you on Wednesday, then,' they both said at once, as they invariably did. Then Herz was free to close his door, to repel interruptions, and to give himself to the brief interval of calm which he usually enjoyed in the early afternoon, before the light began to fade, and the day with it, leaving behind only the shadow of a lost peace.

He got up with a sigh, washed his face, brushed his hair, and went out for his second walk of the day, somewhat restored by the life of the street, the normality of the home-going traffic. What dismayed him more than his futile obsession was this seeming descent into clandestinity, his absences calculated to coincide with those of Sophie Clay, his presences reduced to a form of spying. Nature had played her usual trick on him: after the exaltation the shame, and worse, the consciousness of his own absurdity. Worse even than this was the level of tension that it provoked, the suspicion that it must reach, was reaching, some sort of climax, that he would be driven to further folly by the sheer need for a resolution, and that sooner or later he would bring this about. With his rational mind he saw her for what she was, no more, no less: an attractive girl in the contemporary mould, cool, businesslike, independent, indifferent to compliments and favours, making her own choices, clear as to her rights, shrugging off obligations, making use of unsolicited offers, seeing her future as uncomplicated, a straight progress towards whatever goal she had set herself.

Her mind was impenetrable: he simply did not know how her particular generation operated. He was now a member of the weaker sex, missing the signals to which he had previously responded, those slight alterations of attention, those more willing smiles and acknowledgements, those graceful signs of physical accessibility that he had been used to decode. Now all was arranged differently; men had to be on their guard against purely natural impulses, advances, even gestures. Opening a door, giving up a seat were looked on as patronage, a hand on the arm as an unwanted audacity. Or maybe they had moved on from this position into one of even more extreme solipsism, armoured against what they perceived as superfluity, distraction, a redundant need to show themselves accountable— to other standards, those not fashioned by themselves—to some mysteriously intuited common purpose. Inviolate, women dressed severely, invaded, even conquered male territory, made love without compunction, gave no hostages to fortune, would grow old differently, knowing that they had made no mistakes, had suffered no loss of pride, had not encumbered themselves with outworn methods or procedures, had remained free.